At the start of the 2014 season, there wasn't a great deal of buzz around the Mets. They had signed Curtis Granderson, but with Matt Harvey out for the season, a muddy first-base situation and an even muddier bullpen, the team was a question mark at best.

In the season's first seven weeks, the Mets have managed to scrape by to a near-.500 record, despite the fact very little has changed. At the center of the problems are a baseball operations department and coaching staff who have proved ill-equipped at identifying who its best players are.

Here's a look at several positions and/or Mets players who have been mismanaged this season.

First-base blunders

The problems started at first base. Despite the fact the team has been watching Ike Davis play baseball for more than half a decade -- with most of that time coming in Queens, N.Y. -- they needed to wait through spring training and into the first three weeks of the season before finally deciding to trade him.

In theory, you could suppose that the Mets were holding out for a better return in exchange for Davis, but instead they took a 25-year-old relief pitcher in Zack Thornton -- who wasn't even deemed good enough to be selected in a now-diluted Rule 5 draft last winter -- and a player to be named later, who will likely be a second-tier prospect from the 2013 draft. Given that the team was trying to trade Davis all offseason, that's a pretty paltry return.

The salt in the wound is that the Mets may have chosen the wrong first baseman to trade.

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